Module 14: Creating a WhatsApp Clone
Transcript
in this module we’ll build a rudimentary whatsapp clone i’ll take a very different path when compared to previous cloned applications here we’ll talk about that and these things in the next few slides the first thing i’d like to go into is that this clone isn’t pixel perfect it’s a fast and dirty clone i’ll focus only on the basic text sending functionality and won’t go into nearly as much as detail as i did in the other clones frankly it’s not necessary the functionality is simple once you understand the facebook clone i skipped a lot of the core features mostly due to time but also because these features are covered in the facebook clone and re-implementing them for yet another clone would have been redundant i’ll only focus on these forms i won’t implement everything here either since we already implemented sms verification in the facebook loan i’ll use the sms activation library however i’ll use server side authentication for that library for extra security whatsapp doesn’t use passwords i considered using the phone number as the id which seems to be what they are doing i ended up using a regular id though there is an authorization token which i will discuss later like other clones i use spring boot again that makes this familiar and allows me to grab some code from the other projects the database will read mysql again for the same reason i’ll store data as json locally instead of sqlite this makes it easy to use and debug the code that might be something worth changing if you are building this for scale i’m still using web services for most of the functionality they are still easier to work with than web sockets however messaging is the ideal use case for websockets and i’m using it for that exact purpose when the websocket is closed which would happen if the app isn’t running or is minimized i use push push is used strictly as a visual medium to notify the user of a new message when sending and receiving data in websockets i use json in the past i used a binary websocket and i wanted to show how this approach works as well so let’s start by creating the spring boot project for the server i’m assuming you went through the previous modules and i won’t repeat myself too much you can use the spring boot initializer which i used to create this pom file i just defined a new project with this package for java 8. we’ll use jpa to communicate with the mysql database we use jersey for pojo json serialization the security package allows us to encrypt credentials into the database it has a lot of other features but they aren’t as useful for us we need web services support too and web sockets to implement the full communication protocol the underlying database is mysql so we need the right drivers for that and finally we need the server side twillow library to implement sms support on the server this will be used for the activation code functionality next we need to create the client application which i create as whatsapp clone i use the default native and bare bones settings in the ide i pick the com codename1.whatsapp package nothing special next we’ll go into the classes that implement the client functionality